Mixbus 1.5 released, available for Linux

Alexandre Prokoudine 11. Feb, 2011
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A new version of Mixbus, an Ardour based digital audio workstation, is out, and among various improvements it has a Linux version finally.

Harrison Consoles isn't the first vendor of mixing consoles that tried collaborating with Ardour, a free DAW for Linux and Mac. Before that Paul Davis, principal developer of Ardour, tried working with Solid State Logic (a company co-owned by Peter Gabriel). The co-work later ended with SSL acquiring a different similar product and deciding to go for a development model they better understood.

Harrison Consoles, however, came with a very sensible development model. Being a rather small company of 30+ employees they assigned a couple of developers to the project who do both polishing of Ardour and implementing unique features in Mixbus. That way upstream open source project gets benefits, as well as HC clients who are used to analog consoles get UI they are already familiar with.

In short, Mixbus is Ardour + some extra features like reworked mixer that resembles Harrison consoles with knob-per-function approach, as well as some DSP-fu (EQ, Filter, Compression, Analog Tape Saturation) acquired over years of competing on the market.

Now, what brings Mixbus closer to such a graphics focused website as ours is that all of the awesome UI graphics was done mostly with Inkscape, a tiny bit of GIMP and some Cairo programming, and all of it — on Linux.

Oh, and just in case, while being a proprietary product, Mixbus has a very relaxed license that allows using it on as many computers of yours that you need.